Greyscale
by Cassandra Riley
Summary: If there’s one thing Severus Snape has learnt, it’s that not everything is black and white.


_Greyscale_

-

If there's one thing Severus Snape has learnt, it's that not everything is black and white. Black and white means clean cut. Clean cut means perfection. If everything was black and white, it would mean that life was perfect. Severus knows it's not.

Lily Evans is far from perfect. Her hair is a wild ball of – whatever colour anyone else says – ginger frizz. Her nose is just that slightest bit too small for her face. Her freckles stand out starkly against her almost-white skin and she is the clumsiest person known to wizardkind.

Does Severus care? No.

Truly, he doesn't. Nothing has ever worried him less. From the moment he set eyes on her, she _astounded_ him. Even sitting together on the playground where she lived, a pair of too-skinny not-yet-eleven-year-olds, he wanted her respect, her friendship. As they grew up, all he could think of was how different she was to the facile, over-sexed Slytherin whores whose company was forced upon him on a daily basis. She was _unique_ – imperfectly unique.

Imperfect consequences only can come from imperfect things.

She broke his heart.

Admittedly, it was his fault. He knows this. When everything is going well for him, Severus knows that one way or another, he'll ruin it. He ruined the only worthwhile thing in his life. And the world fell into tones of grey yet again.

"_I'm sorry."_

"_I'm not interested."_

"_I'm sorry!"_

"_Save your breath."  
_

At the end of the day, the Slytherin in him could not be controlled. And Severus wishes, more than anything he ever wanted, that he wasn't the person that he was. Because it is this person who drove her away, that forced words out of his mouth that he did not, that he could never mean.

"_I can't pretend any more. You've chosen your way. I've chosen mine."_

His way. In Severus' mind, the only difference between his way and Lily's way is that her way doesn't involve him. Now, he realises it could never have involved him. That is just the way it is.

_"No – listen, I didn't mean –"_

_"– to call me Mudblood? But you call everyone of my birth Mudblood, Severus. Why should I be any different?"_

But she _was_ different. Not because she was prettier, or nicer, or cleverer than anyone else, although in his eyes she was, of course she was. She was different because she was the only person who had ever, _ever_ given him a chance. Until he met her, Severus had never been given a chance. And, inevitably, he took the chance she gave him and ripped it into a thousand pieces.

When he met her, everything changed. But not in a good way, in a _wonderful_ way. A way that made his life better than he ever imagined it could be. Because when he was with her, everything else that was so unbelievably _crap_ in his life seemed suddenly so insignificant. He left his bitter, argumentative, unloving family behind when he left for Hogwarts and he never looked back. Because he was with her.

He has often reflected, since then, that it is possible to depend too much on one person.

He broke his own heart, when you came down to it. He set himself up for destruction the moment he allowed himself to fall in love with her.

It was worth every second of pain.

Frankly, Severus realises he should have known that she could never fall in love with such a scrawny, sallow Slytherin such as himself. But for a while, he allowed himself a glimmer of hope as to believe that, because she saw past his flaws and became closer to him than anyone else, just perhaps his feelings were reciprocated. Love is a fool's game, and he allowed himself a fool's hope. He was a fool.

Severus recognised that he had lost her the moment James Potter came on the scene. He walked into their lives and at that moment, everything changed. Despite what everyone seemed to think, Lily enabled him to control the Slytherin in him. When Potter turned up, all the bitterness and spite poured out of him in an uncontrollable wave.

Even Lily noticed that this was the point he changed.

Severus could tell that she didn't understand what had happened to him. It broke his heart that she thought that, simply, this was what he had been like all along; that the person she befriended was nothing more than spiteful and callous. In a way, she was right. It was just ironic that, by acting this way because of Potter, he drove her further away. Towards him.

But Potter will never, _never_ deserve her. He doesn't know that she would love it for someone to quote a Shakespeare sonnet to her off by heart, to know old-fashioned prose like she does. He doesn't know that she is ashamed that she didn't get her first kiss until she was sixteen. He doesn't know that as a girl she pretended to herself that she lived in a fairytale, because ordinary life was so unromantic. Potter will never know these things. Because to know this, he would have to love her as Severus loved her. And he could _never_ love her that much. Of this, Severus is more certain than of anything he ever knew.

Severus knows that if Lily Evans asked him to, he would walk to the ends of the earth. He also knows that this is utterly pathetic. And he is sure that nothing hurts as much as love does, because if it did, then love would be overrated.

Severus used to think that it was. Then he met Lily.

Love can't be judged, he has realised, until you have been there yourself. Until you experience it, it is too incomprehensibly huge to absorb. And even so, you will never understand it. Ever.

Severus doubts that James Potter feels for Lily Evans what he himself does. And even so, Potter could not understand her the same way. Because Severus is attached to her in a way that Potter knows not. Severus has never loved another human being. He's not about to let Lily go. Not for anything.

James Potter would never die to protect her.

---

He died to protect her.

She told him that she used to live in a fairytale, and that she didn't get her first kiss until she was sixteen, and he knelt down in the rain and recited Shakespeare to her without her ever even mentioning it to him. Somehow, he just knew. Severus prefers to believe in luck.

But his life has been anything but lucky.

In the end, neither of them could protect her.

Severus knew that he had lost her the moment James Potter came on the scene. What he hadn't realised was that he had lost her forever.

_R.I.P._

-

_Dedicated to Jenny-Beth, without whom I would probably not still be writing._

_Italics are extracts from The Deathly Hallows, and not mine. Thanks for reading._


End file.
